Introduction | 5 | Ethics and Public Policy | Jonathan Wolff

ABSTRACT

A telephone message: could I please call the Home Oﬃce, the implausible sounding Liquor, Gambling and Data Protection Unit. I did, and to my astonishment they didn’t want to talk about data protection. So began my ﬁrst practical exploration of an issue in public policy where it was thought that the perspective of a philosopher could be of use – in this case a review of the law of gambling. Since then I have been involved in projects concerning railway safety, crime, the law of homicide, the regulation of drugs, animal experiments, the distribution of health resources, disability support, sustainability, and personalized health care. In each case I agreed to join in largely because it sounded interesting and worthwhile. I also thought, rather pompously, that political philosophers have a responsibility to take matters of public policy seriously, and it is a duty for those of us paid out of the public purse to make a contribution where we can. It also seemed that philosophers should have something to contribute to all of these policy areas. But what I had not expected, at least not at ﬁrst, was that each of these encounters would teach me something about philosophy. To give an example, let me describe my ﬁrst extended encounter

with the question of the morality of human treatment of animals, while I was a member of the Nuﬃeld Council on Bioethics Working Party on the ethics of research involving animals (our ﬁnal report is NCB 2005). The great majority of members of the working party had a scientiﬁc background, and for some of them experimenting on animals had been a routine part of their scientiﬁc practice for

decades. Many of the scientists were experts in some area where animals were used, either for basic research, or to test either the eﬃcacy or the safety of new pharmaceuticals. Each of us was asked, initially, to provide a brief report of the state of knowledge in our area. Drafted in as a moral philosopher, even though I had never worked on ethical questions about animals, my ﬁrst task was to provide a report explaining the current ‘state of knowledge’ in ethical thinking. Accordingly I undertook a review of some of the major con-

tributions to the philosophical literature, as well as some surveys. (For example, Singer 1989, 1995, Carruthers 1992 and DeGrazia 2002.) One thing that was obvious from a ﬁrst glance was that there was no such thing as the current state of knowledge. The debate was divided. At one extreme were those who argued that current practices of eating and experimenting on at least some more complex and developed animals was in principle no diﬀerent to doing the same thing to human beings, and therefore not just wrong but morally horriﬁc. At the other end of the scale were those who had views that would apparently have been consistent with ﬁnding nothing morally objectionable to cockﬁghting, bearbaiting and torturing animals for fun, although no one seemed quite ready to draw those conclusions. Now, I was perfectly happy to report disagreement, just as the sci-

entists reported disagreement about such things as the feasibility of replacing some current experiments with computer modelling, or the degree to which ﬁsh feel pain. However I was far less comfortable reporting the views giving rise to these disagreements. For on the whole, philosophers seemed to defend views that were so far from current practice as to seem, to the non-philosopher, quite outrageous. The idea that society could adopt any of the views put forward seemed almost laughable. To put it mildly, from the point of view of public policy the views were unreasonable and unacceptable. This was a shock. Moral and political philosophy, I had assumed,

is made for the analysis of public policy, exploring foundational

values, and consolidating them into theories and prototype policies that could, with reasonable adjustment, ﬁt practical needs to improve the moral quality of our public lives. But this common view, it seems, overlooks one crucial point. Moral and political philosophy are, after all, branches of philosophy. And, it seems, in contrast to some other disciplines, the way in which philosophy has developed makes it ﬁt rather badly with public policy needs. In science and in social science a researcher makes his or her name by presenting a view that others ﬁnd attractive or useful and build upon. By and large the situation in philosophy is the reverse. A philosopher becomes famous by arguing for a view that is highly surprising, even to the point of being irritating, but is also resistant to easy refutation. The more paradoxical, or further from common sense, the better. Philosophy thrives on disagreement, and there is no pressure to come to an agreement. Indeed agreement is unhelpful as it cuts discussion short. At a conference or seminar series no one takes minutes of the meeting in order to provide a common statement representing the views of the group. A seminar group can have as many diﬀerent views as it has members – indeed, to recycle an old joke – it will often have more views than members. In public policy, however, a report must be written, or a recommendation made, or a law or policy drafted, just as in science and social science a practical outcome is sought. A need to agree on a practical outcome creates pressure towards convergence. Philosophy, under no such pressure, thrives on what Freud in another context called the ‘narcissism of minor diﬀerence’ (Freud 1963 [1930]). There may be no better illustration of the diﬃculties philosophers

face in coming to agreement, even when they are trying very hard, than in a book published in 1912, called The New Realism: Cooperative Studies in Philosophy, by six eminent American philosophers who wished to found a new, realist school of philosophy (Holt 1912). The book, as its subtitle documents, is written in a rare spirit of cooperation, and part of the project is to set out, in the appendix, what is called the ‘Program and First Platform’, or in other words a

kind of manifesto.Yet the authors don’t seem to have been able to bring themselves to sign up to words drafted by others, and so the book concludes with not one program and ﬁrst platform, but six, subtly diﬀerent, one by each author. (This failed episode in philosophical cooperation was drawn to my attention by the late Burton Dreben.) Philosophers ﬁnd it hard to compromise. This may be a problem

when it comes to committee work. But it is also a great strength. The foundation of all intellectual enquiry is the pursuit of ideas and reasoning for their own sake. Without pure philosophical reﬂection, and the dogged pursuit of what may seem to others crazy ideas, intellectual discussion would be ﬂat and static. The issue, in the present context, is not at all to dismiss philosophical reasoning but to explore how to connect it to public policy. It is tempting to think that the way to approach a moral problem that arises in the context of public policy is to formulate the correct moral theory, show how it would resolve the policy issue under consideration, and then to argue for it, hoping to convince policy makers of the correctness of one’s moral theory and its resolution of the policy diﬃculty. Of course such contributions are an indispensable part of the formulation of public policy. Yet typically they will not take the debate very far. It is unrealistic to think that moral argument can have such power, unless there is already a very broad consensus. By contrast, on many issues there is trenchant advocacy of a number of diﬀerent views, some, but not all, based on moral considerations – which may conﬂict with other moral considerations – and some linked to powerful interests, including the interests of government to obtain re-election. Accordingly governments can feel limited in their ability to make decisions that they fear will be unpopular with the press or the electorate. Whatever the power of one’s arguments in intellectual terms, it has to be accepted that public policy is not a sphere of pure reason. And even if it were, the challenge of convincing others would remain. In the public policy arena, debate diﬀers from abstract moral

argument in at least three ways. First, there is little space for

‘agreeing to disagree’: some policy or other is needed. Second, there is an inevitable bias towards the status quo. At any time, some public policy will be in place, and in most circumstances the burden of argument for change is higher than for reﬂective or unreﬂective continuation of current policy. Third, whether a moral view is correct, or right, or persuasive, takes second place to whether it is widely shared, or at least widely accepted in the sense of enough people being prepared to live with it. This is not to endorse any form of subjectivism or relativism, but rather to accept the practical implications of what Rawls called ‘the burdens of judgement’: that given the free use of reason, conscientious, reasonable moral thinkers may come to diﬀering and conﬂicting judgements (Rawls 1989). If this is so, then there is little prospect of demonstrating that any view is true or correct. Even broad acceptance could be out of reach, but it is a reasonable hope, and, in most circumstances, the best we can reasonably hope for. I’ve suggested that in public life, ﬁrst of all we must have some

policy. Second, we start from where we are. Third, the best chance for moving forward is to draw more people into a consensus view, so that policy can be more widely endorsed, even if diﬀerent people’s reasons for the policy diﬀer. In this respect it is worth drawing an analogy with another Rawlsian idea: that of an overlapping consensus (Rawls 1989). It could be that a particular public policy is defensible even on conﬂicting moral assumptions. To take a very simple example, despite their deep disagreements, Kantians, who believe in absolute moral requirements, and utilitarians, who want to maximize the balance of pleasure over pain, agree that it is wrong to murder innocents when no good could come of it. There are many other examples, of course, to illustrate the point that not all philosophical disagreement makes a diﬀerence at policy level. Murder is the easy case. It is not true that there is always convergence.